Picture this: you’re three mouthfuls deep into one of the most authentic American-style cheeseburgers you’ve tasted in Australia and the restaurant’s sound system suddenly escalates to max as the first few bars of Ray Charles’s Shake A Tail Feather ring out.
You stop chewing for a sec to avert your eyes from your plate to scan the venue for the reason behind the sudden pitch change, and you find the staff have formed a dance troupe and arranged themselves in formation ahead of performing a clearly well-practised dance composition for you and the rest of the diners, whose attention has also been captured from the red leather seats they sit upon in their own booths.
It was an unexpected addition to our family lunch date at Melbourne’s Soda Rock Diner at the weekend.
We had gone to lap up another American diner experience, indulge in greasy burgers, dogs and chips, drink a “soda” on the side, get a selfie with (an) Elvis (statue), and be served our food in the kitschiest manner — and I mean that in the best sense of the word — by wait staff wearing none other than rollerskates.
With mini jukeboxes at every booth, we could select two songs from the era the diner was themed around for every dollar we fed the machine, which would then be queued to the entire diner’s sound system.
The food wasn’t cheap (is anything in South Yarra?), but for parties of five or more, the diner did offer set menus for a fixed price per head, which included a few different burger and hotdog options, chips, drinks and an ice-cream sundae for dessert.
We may have overdone it for lunch, but we’d walked all the way there from Southern Cross Station and would walk all the way back along the Yarra later that same day, too, so we certainly had the appetite for it.
A restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy or themed if the food is good, and likewise, the food doesn’t have to be that good if the restaurant has a unique and appealing theme about it.
We have eaten in many underwhelming little food dens, at sticky tables at big fast food chain family restaurants, from street food stands at which we’ve at times questioned the hygiene, inside unpretentious little cafés, and so on, and enjoyed some of the most delectable dishes to grace our tastebuds at them.
A novel theme or elaborate furnishings just do not matter when the food — or the talent of the chef — speaks for itself.
But if funky accommodation on a weekend away can be considered just as exciting as the destination, a unique premises in which to eat your food can be just as enjoyable as the meal.
We’ve enjoyed a few inimitable venues in the past year, from paying to be verbally abused by the Karens (the staff) at Karen’s Diner, to dining in old Hitachi train carriages atop a five-storey building at Easey’s and eating toasties filled with rainbow-coloured cheese, all in suburbs of Melbourne.
We’ve eaten dumplings from a food truck at a concert in front of a castle in Ballarat, stuffed ourselves at an African-themed banquet at Werribee Zoo’s overnight Slumber Safari and drank champagne (well Mum did) on a paddlesteamer.
We’ve hosted a murder mystery dinner party in the comfort of home, we’ve had Japanese food cooked right before us at our table and thrown at us to catch at Shepparton’s own Zen X, and demolished Vegemite ice-cream — albeit with slightly screwed up faces — seaside along the Great Ocean Road.
I admire restaurateurs who have a crack at something that’s never been done before, whether it’s a distinctive and unusual theme or a rare and original menu item.
It must be a gamble to invest in something for which no-one has blazed a trail.
But more than just admiring them for their bold risk-taking, I’m also grateful for their innovations and allowing us to have such entertaining places to visit and interesting foods to try.
Given humans consume an average of about 550kg of food each year (according to a quick Google search), it’s nice to break the monotony of those three square meals a day, that weekly grocery shop to fill the requirements of that meal plan you wrote (if you’re that organised — I am generally not) and get out there and make the necessity of eating a little less boring every now and then.